Let’s take a break from the flood of Sundance news and all the Oscar talk to look at one of the weirder indie projects out there: the crowd-assembled Star Wars remake. Star Wars Uncut is a project that started over two years ago when Casey Pugh invited Star Wars fans to do their own recreations of specific scenes from the 1977 film Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Fifteen seconds at a time, fans made their own version of the ’77 film, the most special of all editions.

You might have seen the first assembled release of Star Wars Uncut, but the entirety of the film has been re-edited into a more seamless whole, and it is the sort of weird, unpredictable ride that only the internet can provide. This movie is the internet, really, or at many of the internet’s most common obsessions, all filtered through Star Wars. (Itself an internet obsession, of course.)

Despite the fact that fragments of scenes were created one bit at a time, in a wide variety of styles and with technique that ranges from ‘inspired’ (Darth Vader’s breathing represented by a bottle of Johnny Walker Black that fills and drains) to the ‘cute but clueless,’ (quite a lot of it) there is a surprising uniformity here, and the assembled whole is more watchable than you’d expect. this one is a slightly more artfully assembled version that flows much better. Check it out below.

In 2009, Casey Pugh asked thousands of Internet users to remake “Star Wars: A New Hope” into a fan film, 15 seconds at a time. Contributors were allowed to recreate scenes from Star Wars however they wanted. Within just a few months SWU grew into a wild success. The creativity that poured into the project was unimaginable.

SWU has been featured in documentaries, news features and conferences around the world for its unique appeal. In 2010 we won a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Creative Achievement In Interactive Media.

Finally, the crowd-sourced project has been stitched together and put online for your streaming pleasure. The “Director’s Cut” is a feature-length film that contains hand-picked scenes from the entire StarWarsUncut.com collection.